stusmith1977

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Wouldn't it have been more sensible to do the launch from somewhere nearer the edge of the earth?

stusmith1977

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.

The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.

(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).

stusmith1977

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

What was always worse was that the choices never came with any explanation. I remember a while back trying some flavour of Linux or other, and during installation it asked (paraphrased):

"Use Nautilus or Thunar?"

I imagine the story behind this is that half the Linux devs preferred the first, and half preferred the second, and so instead of the distribution having the balls to choose one, they forced they choice onto the user.

For the average user however, the choice read as:

"Open Mystery Box 'A', or Mystery Box 'B'? Warning: opening the wrong box will mean that many of the things you try to do simply won't work!"

Choice here is very bad: it makes the user feel powerless, yet simultaneously assigns blame to the user in the event that things go wrong.

stusmith1977

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

And on desktop too. Page up / page down keys don't work unless you focus the page. There is a scrollbar within a scrollbar.

stusmith1977

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

In situations like this, you can report the bug to Microsoft Connect:

1. Submit bug report. 2. Wait six months. 3. MS tech will post a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release". 4. Wait two more years. 5. Bug report will be closed as "won't fix".

stusmith1977

12 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I've found the "24 Days of Hackage" series incredibly useful - each day is a brief introduction to a useful Haskell library, many of which show off features of Haskell that aren't available in 'standard' languages. Even better, each one comes with working example source on GitHub, so you've got a starting point if you do want to experiment.

http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/

(I'm a Haskell beginner, currently experimenting with using Scotty, Persistent and Esqueleto to make a web API - and these articles have been so useful to me - I'm finally getting my head around monad transformers, using them to extend the standard Scotty one. Proud moment for me.)

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_insolvency_law#U...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_while_insolvent

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I can't remember how tight I made it... but I would think you need a couple spare: one for the number of iterations, and another for the screen stride. But yes, spilling registers like SP and LR is a useful trick if you need it.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Reminds me fondly of the time I was writing assembler for the ARM2/3... it had such a nice instruction set that made hand-writing assembler pleasant.

It had a "barrel shifter" that gave you free shifts of powers of two, so you could calculate screen byte offsets quickly:

  // offset = x + y * 320
  ADD R0, R1, R2, LSL #8
  ADD R0, R0, R2, LSL #5
  // = 2 cycles

It also had bulk loads and stores that made reading/writing RAM cheaper. The trick there was to spill as many registers as you possibly could, so that you could transfer as many words as possible per bulk load/store.

  LDMIA R10!, {R0-R9}
  STMIA R11!, {R0-R9}
  // Transfers 40 bytes from memory pointed to by R10 to memory pointed to by R11,
  // And updates both pointers to the new addresses,
  // And only takes (3+10)*2 = 26 cycles to do the lot.

Happy days...

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Surely open-source handset OSes are just as vulnerable to patent attacks? If Firefox OS were to take off, it would immediately become a target for exactly the same sort of lawsuit.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The article compares to other first world countries, where I seriously doubt there is a problem with (under-)reporting infant deaths.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's not just kids who are reassured by cosmetic changes. MRIs used to be called NMRs. People freaked out because of the word 'nuclear'.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The problem there is the word "allotment". How can you allocate in advance how many sick days to give? If you allot (say) four days sick each year, and an employee is sick three times, surely the rational choice towards the end of the year is to "use up" that allotment?

Without an allotment, employees will generally take a sick day when they're actually sick. Sometimes you'll notice someone who seems to take a lot of sick days. In that case you want to have a friendly chat with them - it's almost never the case that they're just taking free days, rather it's almost always situations like: they're not happy for some reason, they need flex working, they can't afford to repair a car and the commute is worse, they're suffering stress, etc etc. In other words, things it is useful to know about so you can help them (and hence help the company).

Sick day allotments are a way of ineffective managers avoiding confrontations with people: they just end up punishing everyone.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Does "verbatim" mode approach what you need? Google won't attempt to guess what words it thought you meant in that mode.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Judges flaunt the law, surely? I mean, if you're wearing a huge wig and robes, you've got to be flaunting something.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The press could mention it, that would be a start. BBC news for instance barely mentioned the proposed blocking. The only stories to hit the front page (and then, right at the bottom in the Tech section) were the links to Huawei and the spat between the minister and the reporter. The actual proposed block has barely been mentioned. Apparently a baby being born warrants continuous headline coverage; loss of civil liberties gets a footnote.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

And in fact, writing scads of dumb code is often the sign of a poor developer. It often follows from the "never turn back" mentality, that leads them to follow an initial poor choice of solution through to the bitter end.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Steam Cloud Sync can be a bit flaky at times, which is annoying when you play something like Civ V on multiple machines.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm going to add step 5b - save what SQL you executed (against what server, and for what reason), ideally in source control, as an audit trail.

Otherwise, I end up having this conversation (which actually happened):

Him: <Big Client> is having troubles! Features X, Y, and Z aren't working! Me: Hmm, has anything changed? It was all OK on Friday. Him: No, nothing's changed. Me: Really? Him: Well I ran a bunch of scripts on Saturday while I was visiting them. Me: OK, so what exactly did you run? Him: Just a bunch of scripts.

stusmith1977

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff.

(Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).

stusmith1977

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Changing my mind on Microsoft

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